I am a writer and editor living and working in New York City. I am Editor of the Roosevelt Institute's Next New Deal blog and my writing has appeared on The Nation, The Atlantic, GOOD Magazine, AlterNet, and others. From women's issues to wonking out, I'm always looking for the stories that can shape the debate. Previously, I was a financial reporter and head of the energy sector at mergermarket, a newswire that is part of the Financial Times Group. Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/brycecovert.

Romney's Right on the Recovery's Impact on Women, Wrong on the Causes

Mark your history books: this week I actually agreed with Mitt Romney on something. Sort of. In his effort to woo women voters – who are turning away from him in droves – the very day Rick Santorum dropped out Romney tried to wrest the conversation away from supposedly purely “social” issues like contraception and back to economic ones. In proclaiming that “the real war on women has been waged by the Obama administration’s failure on the economy,” the campaign has been pointing out that the recovery period has been much harder on women than men. And I agree!

But there are of course some problems with this. The first is that his math is a bit off. The campaign is throwing around the figure that women have lost 92.3 percent of the jobs since 2009. Many have pointed out that while that number is technically correct, it misreads the situation.

However, it is true women have not done well in the recovery period. Up until August of last year, women had been steadily losing jobs. They’re now taking part in some of the job growth, but not nearly enough: they’ve only gained 12.3 percent of the more than 2.3 million net jobs added to the economy since the end of the recession, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Men have seen their unemployment rate drop 2.3 percentage points from an admittedly very high 9.9 percent, but women’s rate has only dropped .2 percentage points.

Some on the left were quick to push back on Romney’s claims by pointing out that men lost a lot more jobs during the recession. It hit male-heavy sectors like construction and manufacturing hard right away and women-heavy sectors like education and health care were shielded, so the rebound was also likely to skew toward men. But women have been hemorrhaging jobs when they shouldn’t have – and due to a different phenomenon. If men were sunk by a collapsing housing sector, women have been feeling the blows of slashed state and local budgets. As revenues dried up with so many unemployed people not paying taxes (and in need of benefits like unemployment), states have faced huge shortfalls. That’s lead to massive public sector layoffs, particularly for teachers, which have deeply affected women. Women lost 396,000 public sector jobs during the recovery, NWLC says.

And unlike the promising signs we’ve seen recently in manufacturing and housing, things are likely to keep getting worse at the state level. States have projected or unaddressed budget shortfalls totaling a whopping $49 billion for fiscal year 2013. While revenues have been slowly making a comeback, it’s not happening fast enough. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports, “As of the third quarter of 2011, state revenues remained 7 percent below pre-recession levels, and are not growing fast enough to recover fully soon.” That spells trouble for teachers and other public employees, who may fall under the budget-cutting knife.

So is this all Obama’s fault? The timing has certainly coincided with his tenure. Yet much of women’s job loss has been in the public sector, and almost all of that has happened at the state level. And even that is not a widespread phenomenon across all states. My colleague at the Roosevelt Institute Mike Konczal and I did some recent research showing that Republican-controlled legislatures take most of the blame. The 11 states that flipped red in the 2010 midterms were responsible for 40 percent of the total state and local public sector job losses last year. Add in Texas, a redder than red state, which is responsible for 31 percent, and you have almost three-quarters of those job losses.

Hear that, Romney? It’s not Obama’s fault, and it’s not even Democrats’ fault, that women have been suffering so disproportionately in the recovery. That blame lies with your fellow Republicans at the state level. And it also lies with Republicans in Congress. As Matt Yglesias pointed out, Obama tried twice to push through legislation that would have helped prevent teacher layoffs. Who do you think stood in the way of those bills? Yup, they were both blocked by conservatives who denounced them as costly bailouts. Republican members of Congress have stood in front of any attempt to spend more stimulus at all, even though that money could be used to help plug state-level budget holes.

Unlike the mancession, which had some decrying the end of men and threw most of the media in a tizzy, women’s struggles in the recovery haven’t gotten a whole lot of play. So while Romney may be wrong about some of the numbers and the root causes of these problems, he’s thrust an important issue directly into the spotlight. Women across the country who are out of work – or, if employed, making less than their male counterparts – deserve a conversation about solutions that help them out. I may not agree with much of what he stands for, but at least we can thank Romney for kicking off that conversation. (He just may not like where it goes.)

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